Small Mercies
by Bekkoni
Summary: Bruce discovers domestic bliss, and the consequences. Superman/Batman, slash, one shot.


~Small Mercies~

Bruce woke up with his head against Clark's shoulder. The sun shone through the bedroom window, high and bright over Gotham's skyline. Clark was holding his tablet, reading the news at superspeed (no wonder he broke the things so quickly), and the sunlight glinted off his wedding.

"You could have gotten up," Bruce said, and Clark put the tablet down and kissed the top of his head as a good morning.

"I didn't want to wake you," Clark replied. "And anyway, Alfred's making waffles with the kids, and they're not done yet. I don't think we're supposed to interrupt."

"Thank god for breakfast-making butlers." Bruce sat up and winced at the twinge of pain in his back. It had been a rough night, but everyone was safely in jail or Arkham, where they belonged. Lately, old injuries didn't take as well to cold nights spent hopping around rooftops as they used to.

Clark reached over and stroked his powerful hands across Bruce's back, undoing the knots in his muscles. Oh, the benefits of having a husband with both x-ray vision and superstrength. "You know, if the kids are occupied, we might actually have a few minutes undisturbed."

"Mm." Bruce pressed a line of kisses along Clark's neck. He loved Clark's neck, the same way he loved his sharp collarbones and blue eyes and the cut of his shoulders in the Superman costume. There were very few peoples Bruce could ever relax with, feel safe with, but he had never needed to be on edge with Clark. He let the thought happily linger. Maybe mornings made him fuzzy and overly romantic.

Or more probably, Poison Ivy's toxins hadn't quite worn off yet. He decided he didn't really care which was the case, and let Clark slip his hands around his hips, low enough that he couldn't stop his breath from hitching. He felt Clark grin against his mouth, found the waistband of Clark's pajama pants (red plaid and a Christmas gift from Ma Kent, which would have been decidedly unsexy on anyone else), and started undoing the buttons one by one.

The door banged open and Damian and Tim tumbled into the room, carrying a plate stacked high with waffles and two glasses of orange juice. Bruce and Clark sprang apart, trying to look as natural and unflustered as possible.

"We have waffles!" Tim announced, and plunked the plate down between his two fathers. He scrambled up onto the bed next to Bruce, smelling intensely of syrup and flour. Bruce wondered how much of it had actually made it into the waffles. Damian sat at the foot cross-legged. Bruce looked at Clark. The boys were staying, apparently. They both sighed and picked up their forks.

"Pennyworth made me cook, Father," Damian said with a sniff.

"He was bad at it," Tim added, before stealing some of Bruce's orange juice.

"Cooking is a good skill to have, Damian." Clark bit into a waffle, and seemed to deem it acceptable as he poured more syrup over the rest. "My mother taught me how to cook, and believe me, you'll need it when you grow up."

"Father doesn't cook."

Clark gave Bruce a _See what an example you've set?_ look, which was usually reserved for when he read about Playboy Brucie's antics in the paper the next morning. "Your father is uniquely unteachable."

Bruce rolled his eyes. "I could learn if I wanted to. I just don't have the time. Between you and Gotham and pretending to be Wayne, when on earth would I learn to cook?"

"You set a pot of _water_ on fire."

"Once."

Damian just shrugged, like he had made his point. Bruce stabbed his fork into a waffle and took a bite out of it whole. Mornings were too early for civility. It was fluffy and delicious—clearly more Alfred's handiwork than the boys'.

In the next bite, he found a raw egg yolk, and spat the mess out into a napkin.

"Whoops," Tim said, "I think that was one of mine."

Clark examined his waffle with x-ray vision, and picked out a piece of shell. Downstairs, something crashed and Bruce heard shouts and the sound of pounding feet.

He dropped the waffle back onto plate and pushed the blankets off. "Maybe we should go see what the rest of the hellions are up to."

Tim was staring hungrily at the plate. "Can I have the rest of the waffles then?"

"Didn't Alfred feed you?"

Tim stared at the waffles like he was going to leap upon them like a starved wolf. "We had waffles. But more waffles are always good. I love waffles."

"Drake, you are an imbecile." Damian took a waffle for himself and ignored a sharp glance from his father.

"They are growing boys." Clark got out of bed too and wrapped one of Bruce's silk bathrobes around himself, despite the fact that it was a size too small. Sometimes, Bruce was sure that Clark did things just to tease him, but if he was being honest he didn't mind the inch-wide gap between the two sides of the robe where he could see right down Clark's perfect, unmarred chest. "I bet Damian will be as tall as you."

"Taller," Damian said. "I would not let an alien be taller than me. No offense, Father."

"I ought to send you off to Kansas for that, where Ma will make you work and cure you of that mouth, too." Bruce gave his son The Glare, and Damian muttered something that might have approximated an apology.

Clark shook his head like he was about to say something about how he didn't appreciate his hometown being used as a punishment, but instead he just shot a look heavenward and started downstairs. Bruce followed him, and they were greeted by the sight of Cassie and Steph sitting on the kitchen counter, sharing a bag of chocolate chips while Alfred cleaned up a broken bowl and a very ashamed-looking Connor hovered nearby. Waffle batter was spattered across the floor, and Ace lapped at it like it was better than even his favorite bacon dog treats. Another giant bowl of batter sat by Steph's arm, waiting for an open waffle maker.

Alfred glanced up when he heard them come into the room. "Just a bit of a mess, sirs. Nothing you had to come down for."

"We were up already." Clark grabbed a towel off the sink and knelt down to help mop up the spilled batter. Bruce got out the dog food and tried with limited success to pull Ace away from the people food. "Where are the others?"

"Master Jason is away muttering to himself in the library, and Kara is in the gardens." Alfred picked up the ceramic shards and dumped them in the waste bin with a clap of his hands. "Ms. Gordon and Master Richard are off 'studying' together, although I sincerely doubt that any such academic activity is taking place."

As if on cue, Dick and Barbara appeared in the doorway, looking not quite as put together as one would expect from two seasoned acrobats. Barbara kept adjusting her shirt, and Dick blushed and looked at his feet when he saw Bruce.

Bruce sighed and said in a voice only Clark could hear, "They think they're so sneaky."

Clark grinned. "They're sweet. I remember when you used to go through all sorts of trouble to edit the security footage on the Watchtower just so we could have a date in peace."

"I remember when your mother asked you if you were dating anyone and you turned red as a beet when you said no." Bruce held out a treat, and Ace happily licked it out of his hand. "We were both young and dumb once."

Dick and Barbara took the nearly-burned waffles out of the waffle maker and pretended not to be cuddling while the did so. Connor shoveled what must have been two pounds of breakfast food into his mouth. Even Jason showed up out of the library, to take a waffle and sneak out the door. Steph turned to grab a piece of bacon off the griddle, and knocked the bowl of pancake batter onto the floor. Alfred just shook his head.

Clark chuckled and curled his arm around Bruce's waist. "And there's the exciting adventures of the Wayne-Kent family. I'll go get a mop."

"Yeah, I'll help," Bruce said, but for a moment he just stood still, appreciating the tableaux of his family—imperfect and messy, but all together in the end—having breakfast.

Suddenly, it didn't feel like he was standing on the ground anymore. He tried to say something to Clark, but Clark was now faraway and colored in washed-out technicolor, like a dream. He couldn't hear anything that Steph was saying, even though he could see her mouth moving.

Bruce wasn't one to panic, but he could feel every beat of his heart in that moment. He reached for the counter, and his hand went through it. Clark wavered, like an image at the bottom of a pool, and then he and the kitchen disappeared and all Bruce saw was darkness.

*****#*****

_Bruce?_

He smelled smoke. Black and acrid, like burning gasoline.

"Bruce."

And the sirens. It sounded like a battle. But he'd been in the kitchen only a moment ago, so he couldn't be in the middle of a fight. He felt hollow, like the aftereffects of one of Ivy or Scarecrow's concoctions.

"Bruce!"

He opened his eyes and found Clark standing over him, in full Superman costume. A black, many-tentacled and bulbous thing was latched around his arm, trying to sink its sharp teeth into Kryptonian flesh. Clark's eyes flash red, and the Black Mercy screeched as it burned. It was all coming back to him now. A cadre of parademons. New York City. He'd been fighting two of them when one had thrown something black at him.

_Why_, he wondered_, do alien invasions always have to happen on a Monday?_

"Nasty little plant," Clark said, as he dropped the now-charcoal Mercy. "I hate these things. Are you all right?"

Bruce hadn't quite regained his ability to breathe. Clark raised an eyebrow in worry, and so he managed to cough out, "I'm fine." He clambered to his feet, still feeling a bit shaky. Reality didn't seem true yet.

He knew what Black Mercies did of course, having taken one apart the first time the Justice League had encountered them. Psychic botanical, able to give you your heart's desire while it drained your life force drop by drop—of course he'd investigated it. But he'd never been fully under the influence of one before. He hadn't understood how very good it was at what it did, how even now some small part of him still wanted this world to be the imposter, so he could go back to the kitchen and the waffles and Clark.

The real Clark looked at him with sympathy. "Throws you for a loop, doesn't it?"

Bruce could only nod. Diana soared overhead, wrangling six parademons at once, and Clark leapt into the air to help here. Bruce did his best to put the Batman persona back on. A smoking ship landed a block away, and he ran to it with a batarang in his hand, hungry for something to fight, Fighting was easy, and he was good at it. The parademons inside the ship had no idea what they were walking into. It had been exceedingly stupid of them, really, to try and take out the Batman with a happy fantasy. He wasn't very good at peaceful things.

The battle was over quickly after that, all the parademons rounded up and put in a boom tube back to space where they belonged. Bruce found himself next to Clark in the Watchtower, finishing the mission report side-by-side.

"They're getting sloppy," Clark observed. "I think Mongul just feels like he's obligated to annoy us every few months. I do wonder about the parademons, though. Think Darkseid's renting them out?"

"Something to look into," Bruce replied, although he hadn't really heard any of it.

Clark brushed some leftover dust off the sleeve of his uniform. Bruce knew somehow that in that dream, Clark's uniform was hanging next to his own in their closet, freshly laundered by Alfred. Clark must have seen the odd, wistful expression on his face, because he asked, "What did you see?"

"I…" Bruce began, but couldn't figure a way to explain it that wouldn't scare Clark off.

"Your parents?" Clark asked.

He sounded so kind and earnest and concerned that any explanation Bruce had died. He settled on a shrug, which Clark of course took to be a yes. They were standing so close that if he had been a man from another world and another life, Bruce would have reached out and taken Clark's hand.

But he wasn't that man. So instead he swallowed that urge, which tasted like aluminum. The sun would be coming up in Metropolis now, and it gave him an excuse. "It's early…want to come over? I'm sure Alfred will have something on the stove by now. We could finish the report there."

Clark smiled. "Thanks, but I promised Lois I'd take her for breakfast today."

"Sure." Bruce tried to ignore the irrational part of himself that was just a little bit bitter at Clark for wanting to get a meal with his girlfriend.

"We should get coffee sometime," Clark promised. "We've both been busy."

"Yeah." Bruce watched as another call came in through Clark's comlink—some new villain attacking Metropolis probably. They always had an endless supply of those. "See you later."


End file.
